1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to an apparatus and a method for driving an inertial sensor.
2. Description of the Prior Art
An apparatus for driving an inertial sensor is an apparatus capable of sensing angular velocity corresponding to deformations due to acceleration and rotation motion in response to linear motions. Recently, an inertial sensor has been used as various applications, for example, military such as an artificial satellite, a missile, an unmanned aircraft, or the like, vehicles such as an air bag, electronic stability control (ESC), a black box for a vehicle, or the like, hand shaking prevention of a camcorder, motion sensing of a mobile phone or a game machine, navigation, or the like,
Acceleration of the apparatus for driving an inertial sensor may be obtained by Newton's law of motion “F=ma”, where “F” is force applied to an object, “m” is a mass of an object, and “a” is acceleration to be measured. Therefore, the acceleration a may be obtained by measuring force F applied to an object and dividing the measured force by a mass m of an object that is a predetermined value.
Further, angular velocity of the inertial sensor may be obtained by Coriolis force “F=2 mΩ·v”, where “F” represents the Coriolis force applied to an object, “m” represents a mass of an object, “Ω” represents angular velocity to be measured, and “v” represents motion velocity of an object.
In this case, since the motion velocity v of the object and the mass m of the object are a value known in advance, the angular velocity Ω may be obtained by measuring the Coriolis force (F) applied to the object. Meanwhile, the direction of the Coriolis force F, the direction of the motion velocity v, and a reference axis of the angular velocity Ω need to form a right angle to each other.
In this case, in order to detect the angular velocity of the inertial sensor, a considerable amount of power is consumed since the angular velocity of an axis vertical to the vibration axis is measured by vibrating the inertial sensor in a direction of each axis of the inertial sensor.
Therefore, there is a problem in that the apparatus for driving an inertial sensor according to the prior art is not appropriate to use in mobile environments requiring low power.